THIS DANCE WITH DESIRE

Apprenticeship to Love: September 16, 2025

• Today’s questions: Is your nervous system stable enough that you are able to feel to the edges of your desire, and for that to be pleasure, the feeling of desire, rather than pain, desire unrequited?
• Today's practice: Take a few minutes to sit and be silent. Five minutes, for yourself. Now, sitting still and silent, let your mind rest of that thing you want —the touch of a lover, the embrace of a husband or wife, a job, a feeling of home or community. Let yourself feel this longing, so much that you begin to want to “do something” about it. While you are feeling this intense wanting, notice where this feeling sits in your body. Is it in your heart? Your sex organs? Is in your shoulders, or the back of your heart? Perhaps your belly? Then, feeling the want, and feeling it in your body, notice that you are observing yourself desiring. Let yourself enjoy this desiring, not as something to be quenched, but as something enjoyable just in the desiring. After a few moments of noticing, breathe and release the feeling from wherever it sits in your body. Now breathe deeply. Once, twice, three times.  

Rev. Hans Peter Meyer 
(Please, join me in the Apprenticeship to Love Signal chat group. Click on my name and join me in the quiet space of this group. I’d love to hear about your experiences with this short desire practice.)

TODAY’S MEDITATION 

This will be relatively short. I’m tired. This topic that’s come into my awareness is … a lot. 

It was so much that I filled several pages this morning while writing in the garden. But I’m not “there” yet. Maybe I will never be at the “there” I want to get to with this topic. And maybe that’s the point. Yearning is … infinite and eternal. A source of unhappiness and suffering. That which calls me to be more than a compromise. I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll have things to say as the days pass.

…

Yesterday I was guided to read a piece by Justin Patrick Pierce (I’ve excerpted a bit as one of today’s inspirations, below), The Dragon of Sexual Desire.

Guru Singh likes to talk about how in the west we slew our dragons, while in the east they learned how to ride theirs.

I think that where I got to, after reading Pierce’s piece, and after filtering it through my always-changing interpretation of what Guru Singh says about our dragons, is as follows. 

(And please forgive me. I am again running these ideas and experiences through the filter of Argentine tango, the deepest art of sexual polarities that I know of.)

The phrase, “chasing the dragon” is usually associated with the heroin addict’s constant pursuit of the high. The oblivion. Perhaps the dragon of sexual desire is like this for us who are not heroin addicts, and especially for us as men (and especially as I consider what I’m learning about how deeply different “sex” is for masculine-identified men and feminine-identified women, and especially as I read Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina: A New Biography”… More on these things later)?

This is how I “chase the dragon” in tango:

I feel into her, feeling first her body in my arms, then her energy of tenderness and anxiety, her yearning to trust. As she trusts, if she trusts, the slow and subtle yearning to make art.

There is a saying, that “tango is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.” For the uninitiated and the novice, perhaps it looks or seems that way. But it’s much more complicated, and Wolf’s book points in that complicated direction. As does my understanding of what yoga has to say about energy, sexuality, polarities, how our bodies and minds yearn for union.

…

Shakti (the divine feminine) and Shiva (the sacred masculine) search for each other to unite in a multitude of ways. In tango, I am the Shiva awareness, feeling into Her who trusts my guidance, and I create and hold spaces for Her to unfold into pleasures and experiences She does not even imagine exist. Nor I! 

We are together illuminating a landscape that is dark and strange and beautiful. This is the dragon I ride, whom I guide, this dance of desire I dance with my follow, revealing something unimaginable as we move through our “10-minute love affair” (another saying about tango that does not quite describe this chasing and riding of the dragon of desire that is so much more than what we usually think of as sex, yet is shot through with the energy of our sexual polarities…”

…

I dance with this dragon of desire. I make love with the world, with every breath. 

I sit. I wait. I allow this dragon of desire to fly me to Her treasures… And all of it is both too much, and exactly what I need.

And at the end of the tanda, our 10 minutes of music, our 10-minute love affair where energies moved beyond our bodies and mind —at the end of the tanda there is a moment of knowing, of stillness. Then, the music begins again, and the dragon dances, again…

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀 A good man understands that desire cannot be relieved nor eradicated. Knowing this, he stops trying to fill the hole in his heart, and embraces the feeling instead. He realizes that it's his eternal yearning that wakes him up in the morning--that mobilizes his limbs into action, that motivates him to take charge and make change, and drives him towards his life's deepest purpose. He learns to love the hole inside of his heart instead of needing to fill it. …
The secret to mastering desire is to love what is.
Love her as she is. Love yourself as you are.
Love what is, exactly as it is.
Stoke the flames of your desire, but free yourself from attachment to the objects themselves.
Transform your desire into passion by channelling it into that which you already have.
And use it to forge a lasting connection with the person you love, that supports you in becoming the man you must before you die.
To love what is, is to surrender.
And man would rather die than surrender.
It's for this very reason that surrender is the highest virtue of man. (Justin Patrick Pierce, The Dragon of Sexual Desire)

🌀In sexuality, as in birth, we actually lose control, if real alchemy and presence is happening. What a relief. (Kimberly Ann Johnson)

🌀There are so many…. and then I remember you, who sees me and hears me and knows me. (My beloved. My Oracle and Siren, kmy Muse.)  

SIGNAL CHAT

If you have thoughts about this meditation on the crooked path of sacred marriage, please join me on the Signal Apprenticeship to Love chat group.